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Survey of requirements of digital research services in libraries.

Dominique Stutzmann

First of all, I wish to thank

the French Institute and Anne-Elisabeth Buxtdorf for inviting me.

In this session about “the library of the future”, thisvery shortpaper(not more than 15minutes) will trynottospeak aloudthe librarians’ questions and fears, butto give us a chanceof hearingthe users’ voices. If we ask the following questions “Will the library be a leaninformation machine?” or “cultural space?”, or even “will the library as a space vanish?” andif we believe that all the answers are given by the users’ behavior on the internetwithouttaking

inaccount the specific relationship that the libraries can have and maintain with theirusers and what thelibraries can do in order to keep a role in the new informationenvironment, then it will lead us to false conclusions. That’s true that everyone can see onalmost every website the major changes which came with the once so-called “web2.0”:recommendations, crowdsourcing, folksonomies on the one hand, that is user acting aspublishers and being proactive in the field of information literacy, andon the other hand weseea mistrust against “institutional experts”, that has been clearly demonstrated by severalstudies. By saying that, it may seem that all conditions are given for the libraries to disappear:the users are acting as librarians and the experts are not valued any longer, and we don’t seewhy the librarians as experts in information literacy should

besaved. Neverthelessthere is agood reason for being confident: the usersdo not want the libraries to disappear.

In the following minutes, I will present you two users’ studies organized by the FrenchNational Library, the first on behalf of The European Library, the second one done for gettinga better knowledge of our users.

We maysum up the results even though there may be someinconsistencies:bothsurveyshow the ambivalent relationship between libraries and theirusers.

(slide)Part 1

The first

survey deals with the semantic search. As you may know, several search engines onthe web try to give a more accurate access to the different resources and to the different kindof resources (Hakia, Sensebot, Cognition, Powerset, Kosmix…; Sinequa, Exalead, Kartoo). Inthe domain of the printed book, a well-known search engine already uses data mining tools inorder to improve the searching services, especially by giving back the meaning of the wordsto the text, what we can call “semantic”. As a result, city names may appear on a mapthatrepresent thegeographical meaning

which

will some day become searchable through agraphic interface. Some libraries already give access to geography-related resources. Twoexamples: one map giving access to novel according to the city where the story takes place;one second map giving access to travel and tourist guides

in the holdings of a little publiclibrary in Southern France. This map makes it possible to perform the search easily whereasthe subject index of a library could be too precise for the user.

The next step will probably be to provide a graphic interface to the navigation by subject.Many attempts have already been made, but none is totally satisfying (Kartoo

: map as adisamibuisation tool, ThinkPedia

navigation tool, VxInsightprototype,and the interactivemap based on the social indexing on LastFm

that show composers and musician through thecooccurrences in the tags).

Inthefieldof search engine,the TELplus project of The European Library has one part

dealing with semantic search engine and a prototype has been developed under the directionof the French National Library.

[slide]This prototype offers not only a multilingual searchinterface, but also multilingual search services

andyou can type in “cheval”, “travel” and“berg” and find results with “horse”, “travel” and“mountain” or “Pferd”, “Reise” and “Berg”.There is also a way of navigating in the relevant subject headings in the facets on the left side.[slide]

In this semantic prototype, two different keywords extractions are present: the firstone, above, is purely statistic and linguistic; the second one, below, is the result of matchingthe full text with the structured subject headings authority data from the library domain. Bothare very representative of what each technology can do: the first mixes up singular and plural,show as relevant the word “whom”, because it is frequent in the text and more in 1889 as it isnowadays. If you give a closer look, you will see that the second one is much more accurateand has got real subject headings which give us a better and more relevant account of theresource.

(slide)The libraries are not only a major contentprovider(sincemost ofbooks and resourcesbeing digitizedare kept in libraries), thisprototype demonstrates that the librariesalsocanplay a role in the information environment

as they are one of the few cross-domain providersthat maintain not only data, but also structured metadata.

We had a user survey evaluating this prototype with

2 groups of 15 people during a session ofan hour. And the results were quite confusing. For both questions “Which functionality is themost useful?” and “Which is the less useful?”, the “keywords” were the most frequentanswer. And the most frequent suggestion made by the user was also to have clickablekeywords for starting a new search.

If we consider these seemingly contradictory results, we can draw the following conclusion:the users were not satisfied with what the prototype is offering, but theirmain interest iskeyword or concept search and they expect that the librarians can offer better searchfunctionalities in this domain than an average search engine.

[slide] Part 2

The second survey I want to present briefly was made for theFrench National Library

Aims where to get a better knowledge of our users and of what they want. Whatcollectionsdoes the publicneed.

What sort of online communities are using the digitalresources? Are there “invisible” or “self-ignorant” communities we could bring together withnetworking and sharing services?

[The question we didn’t ask is: what is the benefit for the library and for the users?]

The BnF had the

survey done by a consulting firm who offered to combine

three

differentmethods in three successive phases. The results of each phase were used to create newquestions for the following phase. First, we put a questionnaire online

to get a quantitativeview and to get to know the public and its online habits. In three weeks, more than 1,200forms were filled out. In addition to this online poll,

the secondphase included forty semi-structuredinterviews with users in France and abroad. Though forty may notseem like verymany, it is a satisfactory number for this sort of survey.In the 3rd

phase, there were 3focusgroups.

[slide]

First of all, the survey gave us more accurate information about the users than we hadwith online tools such as Xiti or GoogleAnalytics. The gender and age analysis shows thatthe typical digital library user is male and urban.

[slide]

More precisely our users can be broken into two major groups: male retirees orworking professionals over forty

on the one hand; and students of

both sexes

on the otherhand. Women in all categories are younger than men, and there are more female students thanmale students.

All in all, the potential for discoveryin a large digital library has the consequence that 75% to90% of all users don’t know what they might

find in the digital library, even if we can splitthe users into two separate and equal groups: those who know what they are searching for,and those who are visiting and exploring.

[slide]

People with sharing and online publishing habits represent a quarter of all users, which wasquite a lot at thebeginningof 2008

in France, before Twitter and Facebook became wellknown services.

But we don’t really find the expected willingness to share in the digitallibrary.

[slide]

All users expressindeedvery positive feelings about the digital library. Even whenthey were comparing with other digital repositories, they think a library’s digital resources aresuperior to those of a non-institutionalbusiness. That’s why they also all agree that thelibrary should not be “spoiled” by foolish comments: if they use forums and discussion lists

or collaborative websites, oruse the rating functionalities on Amazon.com, the users declarethey don’t want to see this happening within the digital library, because they would rather seethe librarians rating the works or enhancing the reference works.

It may seem paradoxical, but the same people who say that they don’t want to see what otherpeople do, are willing to share what they do themselves.

Theydo not feel this is contradictory.It isa consequence of the positive perception of the digital library:

users are willing to helplibrarians.In a certain manner, users express the desire not to collaborate together, but tocollaborate with the library,thus benefiting all of its users.

The distinction between people wanting or willing to share with the digital library andnotwanting or willing to share with one another is not a matter of age or gender or frequency ofuse. There is aclearseparation between research professionals and amateurs. The researchprofessionals, faculty members and students, have their own sharing tools within theuniversity system: not only do

they mostlynot wish for their comments to become availableto anyone, which means that there should be restricted access to some comments in thelibrary, they also cannot set a limit on their activities,

norcomment only on the onlineresources of one digital library. For us librarians, this is a significant restriction to our hope ofimproving the access, service and quality of our data with social tagging and commentssharing, as the most qualified people are not likely to share within our digital rooms.

[slide]

Also again the debate:social tagging is not only about being fun and user-friendly, it isa way to give better access to poorly cataloged resources. And in doing that, we are puttingthe service and its

use back in the spotlight, from where it shouldn’t have been removed.Thisserviceis not necessarily given as such andcould be deliveredin a more nuanced waybysemantic search engines.Searchengines

canretrieve information from thefulltext andcrossthis information with authority data (subject headings, classification, and so on) on the onehand and with social rating and

indexing on the other hand. By this mean,users don’t have thefeeling the librarians are leaving

them to fend for themselves.

At the same time, libraries have to develop a “no barrier” approach and make their contentsearchable and usable, exactly the same way

as the others’ content would be used fromvarious websites and services. Theywouldbecome more visible on the web and their contentwouldbe found by users who do not look for them.

[conclusion slide]AsI conclusion, I’d say thatasking if

“thelibraries as a space will vanish”can only be a self-realizing prophecy. The missions of libraries don’t change and the libraryof the future should be pretty much the same as it is now. The industries needstructured datafromlibraries, in order to implement services that will benefit to the end users. Thecross-domain knowledge of librariansand the information literacy, the possibility of accessing andsearching licensed resources or to search the relevant databases or open archives repositories.Thereare new ways of fulfilling the needs of the users and that is where libraries have to bethe most creative so that their role in long term preservation and access and their role asresources centers remain clear to the communities they serve.